An American Return to Peace

The Quiet Man has only recently been moved to the top bracket of director John Ford’s great films. As with so many Ford classics, this hilarious but wise story of an Irish-American former boxer (played by John Wayne) is often ignored. The film contains many highlights, but Wayne’s fight with the Irish bully (Victor McLaglen) remains this political science teacher’s favorite.

Wayne’s character went to Ireland to recover psychologically after accidentally killing another boxer in a professional match. Reluctant to fight again,—“quiet”—he is forced into the ring by McLaglen. Locals insist the battle be held under formal Marquis of Queensbury rules to demonstrate their sophistication. The rascally McLaglen professes to agree and circles the area continuously shouting “Marquis of Queensbury rules.” When Wayne follows suit, the burly McLaglen lands an enormous blow to the back of Wayne’s head, knocking him down and almost out.

If only everyone followed Queensbury’s rules, even the many who profess them. That reality is the specialty of foreign policy political scientist par excellence, Angelo Codevilla, who taught for many years at Boston University and is now a fellow at the Claremont Institute. His earlier classic Advice To War Presidents was aimed at the experts, but now he has written a book for all of us, To Make and Keep Peace: Among Ourselves and with All Nations. Unfortunately, most experts in the field never quite caught the Quiet Man lesson. Codevilla tries to educate them.

None of the major foreign policy schools get it. Pacifism enables the bully and finally promotes aggression and war, neither very peaceful. Liberal internationalism denies that nations can be bullies when we understand them better and teach them to be good democrats. Realism thinks we can convince the McLaglen’s to see their better interest in making a deal rather than fighting. Neoconservatism has Wayne become a bully too, not only winning the fight as Wayne does but to reform McLaglen and the whole countryside of unsophisticated rubes to accept the American way, by force if necessary. Codevilla stresses that the word “peace” is foreign to them all.

Codevilla builds his theory on the radical idea that the purpose of foreign policy, especially for the U.S., is peace. This was the ideal that motivated the Founders like George Washington, who urged the nation to “cultivate peace and harmony with all” as its “only” foreign policy goal and John Quincy Adams who set “the first and paramount duty of the government is to maintain peace amidst all the convulsions of foreign wars, and to enter the lists as parties to no cause other than our own.” If war was required by a vital national interest, the goal was to return to peace as soon as possible. This remained U.S. national policy right up to the 20th century and the rise of philosophical progressivism in both political parties.

Progressive leader Woodrow Wilson changed it all, synthesizing Elihu Root’s utopian faith in rational treaty-making, Nicholas Murray Butler’s belief in the obsolescence of war, and David Starr Jordan’s conviction that just men can reform the world. Wilson believed “America’s mission is to bring peace and unity to mankind.” He “had replaced the compass of concrete peace with a utopian creed” expressed in his idealistic Fourteen Points program for the post-World War I world and a League of Nations to manage it thereafter. While his vision was frustrated by his traditionalist successors Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, ever since Franklin Roosevelt progressivism has ruled the foreign policy roost; and the U.S. has been in a constant state of war.

Codevilla holds that all four of today’s foreign policy ideologies are based upon the same progressive idealism. The only way back to a national interest of realism based on peace is to reject its premises. “Gradual and sinuous as wise changes in U.S. foreign policy would have to be, the intellectual challenge would have to begin simply with reversing the progressive movement’s erasure of the distinction between America’s interest and that of mankind, between what is ‘our business’ and what is ‘their business,’ between peace and war.” What is our business? Militarily defending the nation is, by building the best possible missile defense and “behind that shield to wield diplomacy and military power to guard our peace and win our wars.”

Codevilla can offend advocates for peace by his hard Machiavellian assumptions and conclusions (Codevilla is a translator of The Prince). Human beings “naturally crave excuses for treating political opponents as bad people.” In response, the job of 21st century Americans is “giving no offense and suffering none.” And “When others trouble our peace, we impose it upon them by war—war as terribly decisive as we can make it.” Machiavelli warned “never do an enemy a little harm.” But his anchor to peace rests in the same realism. A “green-eye-shade comparison of costs and benefits” is required before any military action. “Discernment of what does and does not impinge on our peace is essential because there is no such thing as a small war.” As much justification as the elder Assad gave by supporting the truck-bombing of U.S. troops in Lebanon, Codevilla argues against U.S. troops in Syria today. If early America could live with despotic czarist Russia, it is possible to harmonize relations with China and Russia today if we respect their business and they ours.

“America’s paramount interest is remaining itself, remaining the place to which would-be Americans born elsewhere come to live in a unique way, without a ruling class.” “‘All men are created equal’ is the heart and soul of what makes America different from the rest of the world. Preserving that exceptional nature is American statecraft’s natural, paramount objective.” The greatest problem with permanent war is that it needs a permanent elite to run it. This ruling class in both parties turns a war on terror into a surveillance operation against “all citizens equally rather than plausible enemies discriminately, it stumbled into a state of domestic siege that foredoomed America to domestic strife.”

Elite power over “homeland security,” in turn, “fueled its sense of moral-political-intellectual entitlement to nation-build fellow Americans” as well as foreigners, labeling dissenting citizens terrorists, producing animosity “among ourselves.” The Department of Homeland Security’s Hot Spots of Terrorism and Other Crimes in the United States, 1970-2008 classified persons “suspicious of centralized federal authority” or “reverent of individual liberty” as “extreme right-wing terrorists.” So U.S. citizens become monitored by increasingly militaristic police.

Perpetual involvement in international disputes leads U.S. leaders to expect foreign nations to follow their ways. These leaders “promote the same recipe of secularism and sex roles” to a very traditionalist world as they do domestically. All U.S. embassies celebrate gay rights for a month each year, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaiming “gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.” As a result, Islam comes to believe that the U.S. “exports godlessness, immorality, the dissolution of families” to them. This affects us too. American troops originally complained of Afghan troops using street waifs for sex and for torturing dogs but Pentagon higher-ups set up training to show American troops how to tolerate their ways for the greater good of winning the forever war.

The world is dangerous and war is sometimes necessary. Strength is required—but it should be to keep the peace. As Ronald Reagan put it, “Peace is the highest aspiration of the American people. We will negotiate for it, sacrifice for it; we will not surrender for it. Our forbearance should never be misunderstood. Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will. When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act. We will maintain sufficient strength to prevail if need be, knowing that if we do so we have the best chance of never having to use it.” Reagan made mistakes in foreign policy, especially in Lebanon, but he did remove the troops sent there after deciding it was not worth the cost. More important, Reagan committed fewer troops than any recent president other than Jimmy Carter and negotiated with the Soviet Union in a way that led to the end of the Cold War in peace, without firing a shot.

Codevilla brings a healthy dose of reality and common sense into the foreign policy debate. His realism will shock many in today’s Oprah-sensitivity world. But getting back to basics should be welcomed if Americans are ever to return to peaceful times. This Irish reviewer personally has a higher threshold for threat and a lower one for requiring “respect” than does the author, but Codevilla’s logic is impeccable. The goal domestically and internationally is peace, and that is achieved by being strong and minding only our business and not that of others. A healthy debate is taking place over foreign policy these days, especially among Republicans, and Codevilla should be the invaluable quiet man in guiding an intelligent discussion.

12 Responses to An American Return to Peace

“What is our business? Militarily defending the nation is, by building the best possible missile defense and ‘behind that shield to wield diplomacy and military power to guard our peace and win our wars.’”

doesn’t sound all that different from what we are doing now, only with the addition of the missile shield. And left unstated is that a missile shield of any use at all will cost approximately a gazillion dollars.

Rather than building a missile shield, we should be working on (1) making sure we take on no new “commitments,” (2) extricating ourselves from unnecessary and unwise “commitments” we have already made, eg in Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Israel, etc., (3) encouraging our remaining allies to do more of the work of defending themselves, and (4) being generally not only less bellicose bully in the world, but less of a busybody as well (here I agree with the article about gay rights and Islam, although it is not only that easy target, for this website, that is implicated, but also other things, more likely to be sacred cows here, like “religious freedom,” that we need to learn to shut up about…whether religious freedoms OR gay rights are respected in Timbuktu or Tashkent is none of “our business”).

If we do all those things, we not only won’t need a missile defense, but we can afford to be less “strong” generally. One need not be a pacifist to realize that the more of a bully he is, the more he has to be constantly on his guard against those who won’t take the bullying, and those who want to replace him.

As a final note, John Wayne wins the fight in the end, and actually DOES follow the Marquis of Queensbury rules in doing so, while Victor McLaglen twice tries to “sucker” punch Wayne before the rules are declared to be in effect, does so again just afterwards (as mentioned in the article), and bites Wayne as well. Wayne, as the ex professional boxer, is shown as able to beat McLaglen, despite the latter’s size advantage, while unilaterally following the rules. (In real life, McLaglen was the ex prize fighter and would have destroyed Wayne, a mere ex college football player.) So, if the lesson is supposed to be that following the rules automatically leads to catastrophe in the real world, the fight in the Quiet Man is not, even as a metaphor, a well chosen illustration of that lesson.

Wars rarely have anything to do with national security. They are usually fought for domestic political reasons. They also generate enormous profits for those who are in the right businesses and have the right political connections.

“the ideal that motivated the Founders like George Washington, who urged the nation to “cultivate peace and harmony with all” as its “only” foreign policy goal and John Quincy Adams who set “the first and paramount duty of the government is to maintain peace amidst all the convulsions of foreign wars, and to enter the lists as parties to no cause other than our own.””

Yes. Yes. A thousand times “Yes”.

A truly American conservatism must hew to this.

And why shouldn’t we? We gained nothing from the interventions of the last 20 years. Tens of thousands of American casualties, trillions of dollars squandered, the moral and geopolitical capital built up by the Cold War generation p***ed away down Middle Eastern rat-holes by three wastrel Boomer Presidents and their incompetent and sometimes corrupt cronies.

Is it idealism? Then why is right wing GOP so for it? I think it is really about being assertive as a powerful country, wanting to pick up mantle where British and company left off.
It started early. Look no further than imperialism and colonization of the Phillippines and Teddy’s R’s activities in Latin America.http://tdl.org/txlor-dspace/bitstream/handle/2249.3/187/06_imp_lat_am.htm
Imperialism in Latin America

The US political economy has been addicted to war since the Second World War ended the Great Depression. We sell to all sides in the Middle East including Qatar, who sells to Hamas in Gaza. The thoroughly militarized state of Israel is a US subsidized show room for US war products.

The war lobby, a/k/a the military industrial complex, is currently promoting a return to the Cold War with Russia (the World’s second biggest arms seller) and they hope they will get a Third World War coming out of Eastern Europe. If not, there is always the Middle East – the last, best hope for permanent war.

See “The Pornography of Power” by Robert Scheer, “The American Warfare State” by Rebecca U Thorpe, and “Fortress Israel” by Patrick Tyler of the NY Times.

It’s not the “warfare state” it’s the petro-dollar economy that is the root cause of the problem…we need the guns to continue our “free trade” policy of importing cheap Chinese electronic gizmos and the junk we buy at Walmart.

We cannot have “free trade” and US economic prosperity without the petro-dollar economy, forcing the US dollar as the only way to buy Mideast Oil, and controlling China by threatening to cut off their oil supply.